The telecommunications industry and Law Enforcement Agencies (“LEAs” including, e.g., the FBI) have struggled over the years regarding Lawful Intercept (“LI”). The general struggle is based on the rapid change of Information and Communications Technologies (“ICT”) and the slowness of LI laws and regulations (e.g., the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (“CALEA”)) to keep up. This manifests in several ways. For example, today in the U.S.A., an LEA has an option for a full broadband LI where the entire broadband content/streams/sessions of an LI subject can be provided to an LEA, yet the LEA may want only selected sessions. As an example, the LEA may be interested in the LI subject's e-mail, but not the video streaming of movies, and vice versa. Yet, the entire broadband LI is provided.
LEAs don't like this arrangement and have tried several approaches to ease the issue. For example, in the past, the FBI had requested a “buffering option” in standards where the Service Provider would buffer the broadband LI for later access by the LEA. Another option is where “summary information” can be provided as part of the broadband safe-harbor standard; although this is very useful, it does not work when all detailed communications are required for the LI. In addition, as we move in the cloud world where a multitude of applications in the cloud (“Apps”) are available and personal communications can be embedded (e.g., VoIP or text embedded in a cloud based multi-player game and/or the like), the problem is that it would be more efficient for the LEA to have access to LI in the cloud on an App by App basis; not access to the entire broadband stream to a LI subject. Another issue is “black SUV rolls,” like “truck rolls” for a service provider (which are costly). In this case, a Service Provider cannot provide the LI interface to the LEA for electronic handover of the LI information, thus the LEA might bring in equipment to the Service Provider's facility to perform the LI; this has inherent LEA expenses and inefficiencies to the process. In addition, there are numerous Apps that can provide for personal communications (such as user-to-user voice, text, or video), many of which are developed by small startups where LI capabilities are not even a consideration. Thus, more and more black SUV rolls will be needed to perform LI.
Hence, there is a need for more robust and scalable solutions for providing or facilitating lawful intercept for cloud computing based applications.